Wednesday, 21 June 2023

Waste and recycling management

Peter WALSH (Murray Plains) (16:41): Most people when they put their bins out on whatever night of the week the bins go out do not realise that there has actually been an increase in the municipal and industrial landfill levy, the bin tax. The bin tax has actually gone up. Again, it is a hidden tax. Most people do not realise that every week when you put your red bin out and every fortnight when you put your green or your yellow bin out – for those that have the extra bin for glass now, you have that as well – money goes into a fund that just sits in Treasury to prop up the budget. There is hundreds of million dollars in that fund that was originally set up to actually make sure that the amount of stuff going to landfill was reduced. It is not being used for that, so that money is being salted away to prop up the bottom line of the budget.

Even worse still, the policy decisions of the government are actually stopping waste-to-energy projects progressing. We have seen some great initiatives for waste-to-energy projects that are not progressing because of the rules and the restrictions on those projects. There is a philosophical view of some on the other side, particularly of the Greens, who are the preferences that keep that side in government, that they do not want to see waste to energy. They want to see zero waste. It is a pipedream to think we are going to have zero waste. There has never been zero waste since mankind started walking this earth, so we need to have waste to energy: burn it, make energy, have no waste and have no landfill. As the landfills in Melbourne fill up, there is going to be an urgent need for that to happen more quickly, but at the moment there is a philosophical opposition to waste to energy. But people are paying a bin tax that they do not even know is there.

A member interjected.

Peter WALSH: It is a small impost, but it is another impost when it comes to the cost of living into the future.